← The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#565: Why journey management matters, with Eytan Hattem, Cemantica
00:31:14
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- [00:01]
Strayer University Narrator
At Strayer University, we help students like you. Go from Will I To why not? For over 130 years, we've been innovating higher education to make it more affordable, accessible and attainable so you can reach your goals. Go from thinking, can I? To Yes, I Can. And keep striving. Visit Strayer. Edu to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and its many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia.
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Carvana Customer
I sold my car in Carvana last night.
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Carvana Friend
Well, that's cool.
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Carvana Customer
No, you don't understand. It went perfectly. Real offer down to the penny. They're picking it up tomorrow. Nothing went wrong.
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Carvana Friend
So what's the problem?
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Carvana Customer
That is the problem. Nothing in my life goes to smoothie. I'm waiting for the catch.
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Carvana Friend
Maybe there's no catch.
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Carvana Customer
That's exactly what a catch would want me to think.
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Carvana Friend
Wow. You need to relax.
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Carvana Customer
I need to knock on wood. Do we have wood? Is this table wood?
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Carvana Friend
I think it's laminate.
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Carvana Customer
Okay. Yeah, that's good. That's close enough.
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Carvana Friend
Car selling without a catch. Sell your car today on Carvana. Pick up these May apply
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Strayer University Narrator
the Agile Brand.
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Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to season six of the Agile Brand where we discuss marketing technology and customer experience, trends, insights and ideas with enterprise and technology platform leaders. We focus on the people, processes, data and platforms that make brands successful, scalable, customer focused and sustainable. This is what makes an agile brand. Greg I'm your host, Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, marketing operations and CX, best selling author and speaker. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information go to teksystems.com now let's get on to the show
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Journey Mapping, Management and orchestration. They're all just different names for the same thing, right? Well, not quite. Even though they're all aimed at creating a more valuable customer experience, they all play unique roles. Today we're exploring Customer Journey Management with Aidan Haddam, CEO and co founder of Symanteca. We'll delve into how understanding and managing customer journeys can transform business strategies and customer experiences. Ayton, welcome to the show.
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Aidan Haddam
Hi Greg. Great to be here.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Why don't we get started though with give us a little background on you and your role at Symanteca and a little bit about what Symanteca does.
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Aidan Haddam
So I'm managing the company. I did my CCXP certification six years ago. But before that I was also doing consulting in customer experience and mainly in customer engagement implementation implementations. And this is where I got to know customer experience, you know, from looking at things from customer perspective. The company that created with two other co founders in 2018 was aimed at transforming all the knowledge we had into a platform, into a technology which is a journey management platform and which allows customers to document their customer experience strategy, map their journeys and then manage all the outcomes of the journeys from opportunities, solutions, the execution, the measurement and the refinement of the whole cycle. I think that the main differentiation was at that time, and still is probably today, is the fact that you manage the journey as a continuous improvement cycle and not as a one off exercise.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, I want to get to that first actually is just this, like I touched on in the intro, just the difference. And it's not that one is better than the other, they all have roles to play. But could you dive a little deeper on the customer journey management, what exactly it is as well as how it's different from. You've got journey mapping on one side kind of, and maybe journey orchestration on, on the other. Not, not even sure. But if you could kind of talk us through that a little bit more, that would be great.
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Aidan Haddam
Yeah, I, I actually like the question because this is something I'm asked pretty frequently in the mind of people. This is like a linear process. You know, they think that there's journey mapping and then journey management is an evolution of that and journey orchestration is an evolution of journey management. And the fact is it's, it's not linear. Each one of them has a role to play. So when you look at journey mapping, this is the practice of mapping a customer journey to having a Persona, mapping this journey of the Persona, identifying the experience frictions and maybe having as an outcome a list of opportunities for customer experience improvement. Then if you look at journey management, journey management is about managing this as a continuous improvement cycle, meaning that you don't stop, just I have a list of opportunities, but you're supposed to continue to solution ideation, transforming these opportunities, prioritizing them and transforming them into solution canvases. And then the solution canvas is trans prioritized and transformed into project based on a cost benefit analysis matrix. You're executing the projects, you're measuring the outcome after a certain while and then you're refining the cycle again. This is journey management. It means there's a continuous cycle here where you have journey teams, sort of journey committees that are responsible to manage the Journey over time. Why do they need to manage it over time and not just to do it as a one off? It's because customer needs and expectations are changing over time and also the organization is changing. So if both ends are changing, the journey isn't static, it's a dynamic journey. And since this is a dynamic journey, it's something that has to be done over time and continuously and not as a one off. Then there's the third piece of journey orchestration. This is also not an evolution of journey management. This is something that plugs into the journey management practice and is helping you bring the personalization based on data in the touch points either to the individual that is currently trying to buy something on a website or as a group looking at a Persona segmentation, what are the improvement or the statistics or the insights that we can conclude from the behavior of certain Persona segments? And based on these conclusions, we are supposed then to act through the journey management cycle. We're supposed to identify the orchestration engine is helping us to identify these insights, feeding the journey of. And then from the journey you're supposed to manage the improvement cycle. So journey mapping is a technique, is a tool to manage, to map these journeys and to identify the experience frictions. This is the technique. Journey management is about transforming that into a continuous improvement cycle. And the journey orchestration is the engine that feeds you with insights, statistics, data, findings, customer routes, optimization, scenarios, everything you need in order to take customer centric decision that are data driven.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And so this is. Thanks for that explanation because I think it does, it does make everything more clear. And yet I think there's a lot of people that are in a lot of teams that are maybe tasked with one of those things, maybe two of those things, but not really tying them all together. What do you think is you touched on the value of this because things are continually changing and it's a dynamic situation both internally and externally. But why are more organizations prone to look at this as maybe they mapped a journey and so now we're done or what's kind of getting in the way of a more dynamic view of these things?
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Aidan Haddam
I think there are two reasons. The first one is, first of all, it's a question of maturity and the ability to tie customer experience to the business goals. I think many organizations are not doing the work of translating the customer experience measures and efforts that are invested in that space into business outcomes. So in many cases that stays like an NPS score. We've improved the nps, but people aren't really able to Tie and explain that the fact that we have improved the NPS score has resulted with these business outcomes. So I think, first of all, there is a gap here that makes people, you know, staying the journey, mapping space because it's a shorter exercise, you do it one time, maybe there is more familiarity with it. And the other practices, the journey management and journey orchestration, I think they're a bit more recent, you know, as a terminology and, and as a space, so there is less familiarity with what they can bring to the table. So probably these two things are a question of maturity, the lack of connection between customer experience and business outcomes that people don't understand, the value of having journey management and journey orchestration in. And thirdly, there's of course, the question of effort. Putting that in place requires from the organization, people, resources, knowledge, capabilities, and in many cases, they're just lacking the skills to do it. So connecting all of it together requires the customer experience, practice, you know, in place. And this is something which is an effort and requires some investment.
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Greg Kilstrom
From the customer standpoint. Customers don't necessarily care how it's done, but they care that it's done right. So it's like, how. What is the customer expectation here? I mean, they, they probably want an organization or a brand to map the journey out so they understand them. But, you know, what are customers really looking for as the outcome here?
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Aidan Haddam
Yeah, I like this question as well, because in many practices that I see today, like people say we're doing journey management and they're stopping at a list of opportunities or with a solution canvas, if you didn't execute anything, nothing happened. So the customer. So there's no impact. The fact that you and me are brainstorming in a room and we are super happy with the solution we found to a problem, but we never put it in place. Nothing happened. It's worth nothing. So I think customers expect to be listened, but to also to act upon the insights that you derive from what they told you. It doesn't mean that you need to do everything a customer told you, because you're not supposed to stick to an individual feedback. You're supposed to look at it from a Persona perspective as a group of feedbacks that you're receiving. And then you need to act upon it and you need to give visibility to customers on what you're planning to do with the comment they gave you. So if I'm looking from customer perspective, definitely they want to be listened. They doubt that you do something with what they say, but. But they are, and they're surprised when you act upon their feedback, this is something that surprises customers today. They like, don't expect someone really come back to them. But when someone does come back, it makes a difference. I had many cases that I have seen with a bad experience of a customer. The fact that the feedback was instantly handled or someone senior came back to the customer and solved the solution or gave a compensation, you know, did an action to fix it, this is definitely doing a very positive impact on the customer and this is what they're expecting, you know, listen to me and solve my problems.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And you touched a little bit on the measurement piece there, but I want to talk a little bit more about that as well. So, you know, certainly CX practices will measure things. You know, whether it's nps, csat, things like that. Organizations at a high level may be looking at customer lifetime value if they're a little more mature on some of those ways. But you know, how do you balance some of those short term things, those opportunities that you mentioned of, you know, if you're monitoring and measuring individual steps of the journey, you have opportunities to do things. How do you kind of balance that with the bigger picture measurements?
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Aidan Haddam
For me, everything is connected. So, you know, the reason why I am, I'm in the business of customer experience is to produce business value. So this practice is a business practice. So everything as an outcome of this practice is not supposed to be smiley faces, it's supposed to be business value. The way to get to the business outcome is to drive this customer experience program in the company and have a journey management practice where you will continuously improve the experience of your customers. Then looking at it from an ROI perspective, the business value, I think the balance is exactly in the middle. So it's like it's supposed to be. When I'm doing prioritization of opportunities and solutions and projects, I'm always putting the cursor in the middle. Of course, from an aggregation perspective, I'm not taking on every individual project and saying it has to be 50, 50. I'm just saying that the initiative as a whole, they need to be 50% for the benefit of the customer and 50% for the benefit of the business. If you get to this balance, you're in the right place.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
Do you think that before an organization really takes the journey management kind of mindset and approach, do you think there's a tendency to perhaps chase the wrong numbers? I mean, you know, is, is simply getting, you know, you mentioned the smiley face. Immediately makes me think of like the, those things in the airport bathrooms or something like, are you, are you satisfied? Or whatever. It's like, you know, are people, it's, it's easy to chase an NPS score. And you know, there, I know there's been research and I'm not going to denigrate it too much, but like, you know, are people chasing the wrong things, in other words, at the expense of great customer experience?
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Aidan Haddam
I think this, it became an industry, you know, it became an industry to chase NPS numbers and CSAT numbers. And I think this is wrong to do it. Not because I don't think NPS or CSAT have value. I do think they have value. I just don't think that this is the aim. You know, that's not the end goal. You're not supposed to chase your NPS score. What you're supposed to chase. Really, Are you meeting your customer expectations? This is the only question I want to answer. Then the outcome would be that I will improve my NPS score if I'm doing a good job. So the NPS is a good indicator for me to tell me what is happening with my health, Am I healthy with csat? If I'm having good scores, then probably I'm doing things in the right direction. If I'm having negative score, bad scores, then I know something is wrong with my operation and I need to get in and deep dive. But again, the NPS and the CSAT and CES and all of these for me are major supporting information for me. But I am always looking, what is the customer ambition? What are the needs and what are the expectations? What are the frustrations? Then I'm asking myself through journey mapping exercise and the journey management cycle, am I answering these needs? Am I solving the problems? Am I addressing the issues? Am I meeting expectations? If I am doing this, the rest will be an outcome and I would be happy with what I'm doing.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
And I think even the creators of NPS and CSAT and all that would, would mirror that. You know, it's like, it's because again, I think it, I think people naturally want to conserve energy and, you know, it doesn't, it doesn't make them lazy. It doesn't make them, it's just people, when they're given a goal to achieve, they want to achieve it. Right. And so if they're given this goal of like achieve a higher NPS score, okay, let's, let's do it, you know, and when they do, take to your point. Yes. It can become just kind of a score versus the nuance. Of let's actually create better individual experiences and better points along the way. And kind of to that end, I want to talk a little bit about what that actually looks like because again, I think a lot of people may be coming from organizations where to the earlier points in our conversation, you know, they did a journey mapping exercise or they talked a lot about the customer journey and feel like, okay, box checked, you know, we did cx, you know, what does it actually look like to manage a journey and be, you know, who, what are the roles involved and you know, what, from an operational standpoint, you know, who do you need and doing what?
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Aidan Haddam
So I would say the first step, first of all, before you start mapping journeys and managing the journeys, first of all, define your customer experience strategy, define your brand values, define the customer ambition and define your brand promise. This is my starting point because there are many because the journeys are supposed to reflect your brand values and they are supposed to reflect your brand promise. That's the question you will be asking yourself in your journey. Am I keeping the promise that I gave to my customers? So if you are a McDonald's, then your promise, one of your promises would be fast food, right? So if you will be waiting in the queue for 30 minutes, you will be disappointed. So that's why for me it isn't just about starting to map the journeys. It's first of all to define this strategy and the brand promise. Then the second step would be to establish your journey management practice. And here you will nominate, you will nominate a journey owner and you will nominate journey committees which are the people, a cross functional team that will work with the journey owner in optimize mapping the current state of the journey, mapping the future state of the journey, the desired one, then doing gap between them gaps and then building an experience roadmap and managing this whole journey. Next to this, to the journey committee we will have the customer experience committee because journeys reside in a bigger thing. So there's supposed to be a customer experience program in the organization and journeys are part of it, the journey management practice. So inside the journey management practice you have the journey manager and the journey committees and they will be working on something we call the journey atlas. So the journey atlas would be a map of, of all the journeys you have in your organizations or let's say the main ones. You will be prioritizing these journeys based on some criteria you will be putting in place. Like for example, do you want to work on VIP customer journeys? Do you want to map the mainstream journeys? Do you want to map journeys where you have issues that these are examples and then you will start mapping them with a journey framework. And the journey framework is the levels of the journeys that you're mapping. You will start with a level zero journey would be your master journey. And then you will zoom into the different stages of the high level journey in order to create sub journeys. Okay. Level one and level two journeys. So think of it as a tree of customer journeys that are forming your journey atlas and this is your universe. And inside the teams that are the mapping teams are responsible to take one or more journeys based on their competencies and knowledge and to start doing this continuous improvement cycle of mapping current state journeys and future state journeys. So you need cross functional teams. You need the journey manager which will be an owner of one or more journeys. You need a CX team or CX committee that will give the bigger perspective with handling also the cultural aspects, the strategy and the other things around journeys because it's not just journeys. And then you will start deep diving, extracting experience friction, ideating solutions, executing project measuring and refining.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
So yeah, I mean that's, that's, that's a lot there, you know, it's which,
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which is, which makes sense because I
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mean if, you know, if, if the customer experience is important, which we, I would say we both agree here and most listening out there will certainly agree as well. It takes different people looking at different aspects. When you're working with organizations, obviously every organization is structured a little bit differently. But one of the trends, things that I try to keep an eye on is are there more customer experience teams and departments popping up or you know, sometimes there's talk of moving CX into a marketing function. You know, are you seeing any trends one way or the, or the other or is it just, does it just kind of depend on the organization?
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Aidan Haddam
This is also a good question actually. I thought a lot about it and when I'm looking, you know, working many organizations and I see, I see actually everything, everything at the same time. So I do see customer experience team popping. I do see customer extreme being absorbed in marketing or customer success or in strategy or in operations or in other places digital. And I see places where CX is thriving and I see CA where places where CX is disappearing. Also where they're closing. The customer experience program and organization don't understand, didn't see the value that it brings because, and mainly that's the main point in most cases where it happens, it happens because the customer experience program did not bring or prove business value. This is the Main reason why that will be stopped. So as a trend, I see a sort of. Maybe it's not the right word. It's sort of a mess. Let's say it's a mess in the sense that there isn't anything guiding this. For the moment we are in exploration, the CX function. Let's also say the truth. It's relatively new. It's a new role, a new practice versus hr, finance, sales, marketing, customer service, which are here forever. If you go today to a company and you say, hey, create me a company, what would you do? You would create the finance, hr, sales, marketing, customer success, right? You won't necessarily say I have to have a customer experience team because if not my organization won't work. This is not true. But you will not say, you will not hear an organization saying, oh, I don't need sales, I don't need to do marketing, I don't need to do finance. That doesn't exist. Customer experience didn't embed itself yet as a core critical function that has a place around the table. We are missing chief customer officers in the landscape. And I think that this is also a question of maturity. We need to wait until the practice finds its right spot in the organization. And also another thing I want to say because I think it's very important and is impacting this message is customer experience is a transverse role. It's not a silo. Look at organization. All of them are siloed, right? Everything is siloed. People work in a silo. Customer experience is working for the greater good. And working for the greater good is a problem in a company because it doesn't belong to any silo. And working as a transverse function is something that's very challenging. This is the reason why it's hard to prove value.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Yeah, I refer to it and a few other things I would put in there as well as sort of like horizontal functions. I just use that term, but totally agree. Well, given that, and I also agree that it is a little bit of a mess all over the place depending on where you look. I keep trying to find a trend as far as the way things are shifting, but it does seem like there isn't a clear one at this point. Where do you see then the field of journey management evolving over the next months or years? What should organizations be keeping an eye out for? Whether that's technologies, methodologies, roles, things like that.
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Aidan Haddam
I think the main trends we will see is the deeper and deeper AI involvement in customer experience management and in journey management. In particular.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah.
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Aidan Haddam
So we will be using artificial intelligence and machine learning and algorithms to manage the journey, to identify recurring issues, to ideate solution, to identify areas of opportunities to create journeys, to create Persona segments. There will be many things that AI will be doing, working like a co pilot next to CX teams. This is one thing. The second thing, I think that journey management will become the leading practice. So journey mapping will be absorbed into it and there will be closer and closer ties between Journey Management and Journey Orchestration until a certain point in time where probably these two things are going to merge. Like Journey Insights merged into the Journey Orchestration platform or the big VOC platforms. Big VOC players bought, all the big Journey Insights players out there, they merged and probably the next step would be merging Journey Management and Journey Orchestration. Because at the end, customers, they need one solution. You know, I need one solution. So would be much better and easier if everything would be working as a one core customer experience business application. Which is my, let's say my vision to the future is that customer experience will become an app. Like you have ERP CRM finance system and an HR system. You will have a CX system that will be your source for your health, of your customers, for the actions you need to do for your scores, for everything that relating to your customers, you will be going there. Up until then, it will probably be an ensemble of systems and capabilities with will you be doing brainstorming in whiteboards, mapping in journey mapping tools or journey management platforms, orchestrating and collecting data and insights in journey orchestration platforms and this type of thing. But at some point there will be consolidation.
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Greg Kilstrom
Yeah, yeah, it definitely seems like consolidation is in the cards, so to speak. Well, Ayton, thanks so much for joining. One last question before we wrap up here. For those organizations that are, you know, maybe doing, they're doing journey mapping, they're doing some orchestration, but they're not tying it all together with journey Management. You know, what, what would your advice be to a brand that's, you know, kind of just exploring the concept of customer journey management?
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Aidan Haddam
I think that the first of all get, get the practice, you know, get the knowledge of how best practice journey management should be implemented in an organization. So I would start first of all researching, gaining the knowledge, looking at examples so I know what I'm doing. And then I would look into 1, 2, 3 journeys where I would try to implement this approach, tying my journey map to the VOC data sources. So to surface to transform my maps from static maps into dynamics map, which are data infused and using like platform and journey management platform, testing it out in a POC on one, two, three journeys and one to three departments, just getting some teams in, seeing the value, tying the business goals into my journeys that I've mapped, so putting the business KPIs there and really running the full cycle so defining what I've said with the brand values and the brand promise, mapping, taking one journey map, adding to this map the business KPIs and linking into the map the VOC data, the journey orchestration engine to surface the data, the sentiment, feedback and all of that and then based on that doing the exercise of prioritization with opportunities solution projects as a funnel taking six months waiting to measure the outcomes. And if I see positive outcomes in this cycle and I see it's working well for me, I would start establishing it as a practice, creating Persona templates and journey templates, creating guidelines for mapping journeys, explaining and educating the organization on the culture of customer experience, and really starting to expand that as a practice that everyone shares and everyone contributes to.
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Carvana Friend
Yeah, yeah.
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Greg Kilstrom
Well, great stuff. Well again I'd like to thank Aitan Haddam of Symanteca for joining us today and sharing his expert insights on customer journey management. You can learn more about Ayten and Symanteca by following the links in the show notes.
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Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show more easily. You can access more episodes of the show at www.greggkilstrom.com. that's G R E G K-I H L S T R O M.com While you're there, check out my series of best selling agile brand guides covering a wide variety of marketing technology topics. Or you can search for Greg Kilstrom on Amazon. The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay Agile.
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Strayer University Narrator
The agile brand.